Health, Safety and Environment

Workers' Memorial Day Event - Bedford ATE, 25 April 2007

by Dean Pullen (Branch Health, Safety and Environment Co-ordinator)

The branch held an event to commemorate Workers' Memorial Day. This is an international event held on April 28th each year. As this fell on a Saturday this year we held it as near to the day as we could.

Sixteen of the branch Union Safety Representatives attended the event. The guest speaker was Linda-Jane Rigby an Inspector from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Linda-Jane gave a detailed talk on Enforcement and Inspection which was this year’s theme. She went into detail on the powers they have and we were surprised to learn that in some situations they have more power than the police; for example gaining entry into property.

She spoke at length on enforcement and explained to us how they rate the hazards in a particular situation and depending on how high or low the score is would depend on the penalty given. She gave us some good examples of some of the situations she has been involved in. These situations were in a wide range of industries including agriculture, catering, office buildings, and included small to large sized businesses.

Linda-Jane was invited to speak for about an hour, but as the subject was very interesting and the group were asking questions during the talk, we felt that she could have spent the whole day there.

After lunch I gave a short presentation on Workers Memorial Day, this was followed by a minutes silence to remember all those killed at work.

For those that do not know, the number of workers killed each year while doing their job in the UK is around 1,600. The number of CWU members killed at work is 27, when we had this event in 2005 there were 13.

The rest of the day the USR’s were split into four groups and for an hour we carried out a building inspection of Bedford ATE. We then met up again and discussed our findings; this was to give an insight of building inspections to the new USR’s in the branch and also to cover the inspection part of Workers Memorial Day.

It is worth mentioning that workplaces that have Union Safety Representatives in place are 50% safer than those without!